Rime Priming Effects in Spoken Word Recognition

In this study, we re-examined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vord/-/kord/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vord/-/kord/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/-/kord/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vord/-/kord/) and the transposed-phoneme "rime" /vord/-/kord/ conditions. We also observed a significantly greater priming effect in the former condition than in the latter condition. We use the theoretical framework of the TISK model (Hannagan et al., 2013) to propose a novel account of final overlap phonological priming in terms of activation of both position-independent phoneme representations and bi-phone representations.